IE 8 Connectivity Enhancements

If you ask any .NET developer what is the number of http requests you can send to a given server at once - he will answer 2. He will be even more sure if he wrote some ajax pages or even worked with Microsoft Ajax.

Well as it turns out this answer is not correct. and especially not true in case of IE 8. As it turns out , when we are using IE 8 , rather its an HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 request we can now use  6 concurrent connections to the same server.

Here is a summary table from the msdn site:

The limitation was because of the 2 historical reasons:

1. At the time it was decided this was the limitation in other browsers.

2. At the time it was decided the Internet was not as fast as today . Today of chores we have high-bandwidth connections.

For more details: AJAX - Connectivity Enhancements in Internet Explorer 8